Trip to Microsoft

6th Class

Tuesday, September 4, 2018 (All day)

On September 4th, Sixth class were lucky enough to visit the Micrsoft European Headquarters. We left at 08:30 and took the Luas to Central Park. When we arrived, we were greeted by one of the employees called Amanda who then accompanied us down to the building. We met some more employees and we were told about the fabulous facilities that the staff could avail of including a hair and nail salon, spa, gym and yoga room. All of which are free of charge!
The room we were then led into was called the Dreamspace. We received drinks and fruit and started ‘thinking.’ We had two questions to answer, the first one being: How do you think technology will have changed the world in 2050? We said we thought there would be cures for diseases such as cancer and viruses. The second question was: What can humans do that robots can’t? Some of the answers were: that we can be creative, robots can only think what they have been programmed to think, we can see and have emotions and our behaviours change in different circumstances.
We then moved on to coding a little device called a micro-bit. We made it play music, make shapes and patterns using LEDs and even tell the temperature, with a bit of help from the instructors. We all felt as if we worked there.
Next we looked at the United Nations seventeen sustainable development goals. In our groups we chose our three favourite goals. We had laptops and got to use a piece of software called ‘Mixed Reality’.This allows you to take a photo, and if you want, there could be an elephant in the room in the photo! Using our three photos we made a slideshow about the goals, which, when finished, were shown to the rest of the class.
We received a gift of a Dreamspace bag, a water bottle, an eco-friendly pencil case, earbuds and a Dreamspace sticker. We had a great day at Microsoft and enjoyed it thoroughly. Thank you to all involved in organising our brilliant day!